Starfruit contains a neurotoxin known as caramboxin that can cause irreversible brain damage at high enough doses. If someone walks into the emergency room with intractable hiccups, one of the questions the ER physician should ask is: Have you been eating star fruit? In my video cautioning about oxalate-rich foods, Kidney Stones and…
What are the effects of eating only five days a week or following a fasting-mimicking diet five days a month? Instead of eating every other day, what if you ate five days a week and fasted for the other two? As I discuss in my video The 5:2 Diet and the Fasting-Mimicking Diet Put…
Alternate-day modified fasting is put to the test for lifespan extension. Is it true that alternate-day calorie restriction prolongs life? Doctors have anecdotally attributed improvements in a variety of disease states to alternate-day fasting, including asthma; seasonal allergies; autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis; infectious diseases, such as toenail fungus, periodontal disease, and…
Eating every other day can raise your cholesterol. Are there any downsides to fasting every other day? For example, might go all day without eating impair your ability to think clearly? Surprisingly, as I discuss in my video Is Alternate-Day Intermittent Fasting Safe?, the results appear to be “equivocal.” Some studies show no measurable…
According to the United Nations, meat and dairy production would need to be doubled to meet the predicted demand for animal-based proteins in 2050, but the opposite is required to contain the ecological damage. As I discuss in my video The Environmental Impacts of Plant-Based Meat Substitutes, if we have any chance of sustainably meeting…
Does eating every other day prevent the metabolic slowing that accompanies weight loss, or does it improve compliance over constant, day-to-day caloric restriction? Rather than cutting calories day in and day out, what if you instead ate as much as you wanted every other day or for only a few hours a day? Or, what…
The evidence linking cannabis use to psychotic disorders is considered strong enough to warrant a public health warning. “Even as proponents of [cannabis] legalization contend that smoked marijuana is a harmless natural substance that improves the quality of life, a growing body of evidence links it in a small but significant number of users…
Why should fasts lasting longer than 24 hours and particularly for three or more days only be done under the supervision of a health professional and preferably in a live-in clinic? Fasting for a week or two can actually interfere with the loss of body fat, as shown at the start of my video…
Like the keto diet, fasting for one or two weeks can actually slow the loss of body fat rather than accelerate it. Fasting obviously causes consistent, dramatic weight loss, as shown in the graph below and at 0:09 in my video Is Fasting Beneficial for Weight Loss?, but how do fasted individuals do long-term? Some…
For more than a century, fasting has been used as a weight-loss treatment. I’ve talked about the benefits of caloric restriction. Well, the greatest caloric restriction is getting no calories at all. Fasting has been branded “the next big weight loss fad,” but it has a long history throughout various spiritual traditions, practiced by Moses,…